America's election choices – Volume 13, Issue 9 – November 2007

 

The 2008 US presidential election campaign commenced, in effect, more than a year ago, and has nearly another year to go. Campaigning for America’s highest office has become virtually a never-ending feature of the political landscape. But voters only pay serious attention to the battles for their parties’ respective presidential nominations in the autumn. This real battle has now begun in earnest. The first important test – the complicated contest of Iowa party ‘caucuses’ – is less than five weeks away on 3 January. It will be followed in quick succession by state primaries in New Hampshire and North Carolina. Nevada will also hold a state caucus in January. Then, on 5 February, at least 20 states – including electoral powerhouses California and New York – have scheduled what amounts to a national primary: ‘Super’ or ‘Tsunami Tuesday’.

 

On the Republican side especially, it is considered almost an iron law of presidential politics that the eventual nominee must win two of the first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and North Carolina. More than 30 years have passed since a campaign went all the way to the nominating convention, when President Gerald Ford narrowly beat back a challenge from Ronald Reagan to be the 1976 Republican candidate. Yet there is a possibility that Republicans in 2008 could find themselves in a similar drawn-out fight for the nomination.

 

The mood throughout the summer of 2007 was one of growing Democratic confidence and deepening Republican despair. However, mood is no great predictor of future events, and the uncertainties are huge. Among other things, the leading Democratic candidates are, respectively, a woman and an African-American. While there is considerable evidence that American voters are ready to elect a female or a black president, the proposition is not yet proven. On the Republican side, disarray and ideological confusion compound the problem of a party that is led, at least nominally, by a uniquely unpopular second-term president. Not counting the impeached Richard Nixon, there have been three other two-term presidents in the post-Second World War era – Dwight D. Eisenhower, Reagan and Bill Clinton. Only Reagan was followed by a president from his own party. Yet, in stark contrast to George W. Bush, each had public approval ratings well over 50% as the voters chose their replacements.

 

Republicans hope to be rescued again by national security, on which they have long held the advantage among voters. The hope is somewhat counterintuitive, in that the biggest single source of Bush’s unpopularity is the war in Iraq. In truth, though, Iraq and national security policy more broadly pose problems for both parties.

 

 

The media narrative of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination focused initially on the star power of Illinois Senator Barack Obama, a 46-year-old black lawyer who has proclaimed a message of overcoming the great national partisan divide since giving a much-acclaimed speech on the common experience and aspirations of ‘Red America’ and ‘Blue America’ at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Obama’s appeal, however, has not managed to overcome the front-runner status of New York Senator Hillary Clinton, wife of the former president. Clinton and her campaign team have managed to convey an aura of inevitability, and an image and a record of steely competence. ‘She simply does not make mistakes’ has become the common refrain among political cognoscenti, and it is a perception that appears to have affected the calculations of Democratic primary voters who – still embittered by the Bush–Gore election dispute and angry at the Bush administration – are concerned above all about which Democratic standard-bearer can fight back and win against the ‘Republican attack machine’. The Democratic argument about ‘electability’ has been thereby transformed – Clinton, notwithstanding the national hate campaign conducted against her in the 1990s, and worries even among supporters about high negative ratings in public-opinion surveys, is now deemed by many to be the most likely winner.

 

Assessments of Obama’s candidacy have meanwhile been altered by his uneven campaign performance. He has the capacity to inspire crowds, and presents the compelling prospect of a mixed-race American, with a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, whose eloquence and personal history might help improve the catastrophically low opinion of the United States around the world. Comparisons have been made to the intelligence and charisma of the slain John F. Kennedy or his brother Robert, also assassinated, or even Obama’s fellow Illinois politician Abraham Lincoln – whose presidency was the culmination of a comparably limited political career. Yet a politically less auspicious comparison also presents itself: that of Adlai Stevenson, another Illinois intellectual, who was the darling of 1950s Democratic liberalism, but who led his party through a decade of defeats against Eisenhower. The fear of some Obama enthusiasts is that their candidate may fit the archetype of Stevenson or the 1968 contender Eugene McCarthy – beloved by highly educated and often affluent liberals, but maybe too coolly cerebral to thrive in mass politics.

 

It is much too early, however, to write off Obama or to crown Clinton with the Democratic nomination. Although Clinton, as of mid November, maintained a 20 percentage-point lead in most national public-opinion polls, the race in Iowa was much tighter – a virtual three-way tie among Clinton, Obama and John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, and running mate to Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004. Victory or defeat in the early states – or even an unexpectedly narrow result in any of them – could transform the expectations and psychological dynamics for voters on Super Tuesday. This was what happened in the 2004 contest for the Democratic nomination, when the front-runner, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, was defeated in Iowa by Kerry, who went on to win the nomination. Other candidates still in the race include New Mexico Governor and former UN ambassador Bill Richardson; Delaware Senator Joseph Biden; and Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd.

 

If Obama does score early, his prospects certainly will not be constrained by a lack of funds; he has raised the phenomenal sum of $80 million, roughly comparable to Clinton, and far more than any Republican, an unusual disparity that seemingly attests to the considerable enthusiasm of Democratic partisans in this cycle. (The Edwards campaign, on the other hand, could be in trouble financially even if he wins one or more of the early states.)

 

An important source of Democratic enthusiasm this year is that they seem generally satisfied with their range of choices. The Republicans, by contrast, confront an array of candidates who each in their different way pose a challenge to the current conservative consensus. Front-runner Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, is a social liberal on such matters as civil rights for homosexuals and legalised abortion; he has so far managed to compensate among the religious and rural right with his promise to keep America on the offensive in the ‘war on terror’. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney also had a moderate-to-liberal record when he presided over that liberal state; in the campaign so far he has risked the label of ‘flip-flopper’ for veering sharply to the right, but his bigger vulnerability may be that he is a devout Mormon in a party whose evangelical base considers Mormonism to be a non-Christian cult. Arizona Senator John McCain, a Vietnam war hero, has a consistently conservative record on such matters as outlawing abortion, but has angered conservatives by favouring strict campaign finance reform, opposing the Bush tax cuts (though he now says he would not reverse them), sponsoring legislation to take action against global warming, pushing definitive prohibition against the torture of terrorist suspects, and being open to an immigration reform that would allow millions of illegal immigrants to normalise their status. Former Kentucky Senator Fred Thompson, a character actor in Hollywood and a star of the popular TV legal drama ‘Law and Order’, was once considered the conservatives’ saviour, but since his late entry into the race he has run a lacklustre campaign and appears to have faded from serious contention. The one second-tier candidate who might have significant hopes for breaking away is former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. He is an ordained minister, an evangelical Christian who sets himself apart from much of the Christian Right by insisting he is a ‘conservative … just not angry about it’. His engaging sense of humour and comfort with cultural cross-currents – he plays, for example, in a rock band – are among the assets that have given him considerable momentum in Iowa; some polls show him running second there to Romney. But Huckabee too is out of step with much of Republican orthodoxy, emphasising issues of socio-economic equity above the shibboleth of tax cuts.

 

The absence of a conventionally conservative candidate, together with the pessimism and anger engendered by the immigration issue and the performance of the Bush presidency, has given a highly uncertain configuration to the Republican race. Pundits generally assumed that Giuliani’s early front-runner status was the consequence of his high name recognition and prestige associated with his leadership of New York City in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001. They assumed that once conservative voters learned of his positions on such issues as abortion rights – not to mention his own volatile marital history – he would sink fast in the polls. This has not happened, however; he maintains a comfortable 30% share in national polls, followed by McCain at 15%. Romney on the other hand, is ahead in the earliest states, Iowa and New Hampshire, and not far behind Giuliani in South Carolina. McCain, who was the early presumed favourite and then fell into financial straits and campaign disarray, has hung on stubbornly and is now rising again in some polls.

 

The fight for the Republican Party nomination may, therefore, be long, with no candidate winning decisively and several competitors remaining contenders, perhaps as far as the nominating convention in summer 2008.

 

The American electorate in 2008 will face the starkest set of policy alternatives of any election in memory. Notwithstanding Giuliani’s views on abortion and gay rights, and McCain’s maverick opinions on other issues, the Republican candidates hew closely to the party’s tax-cutting and religious-nationalist orthodoxy. The leading Democratic candidates, although squarely in the centrist tradition established by Bill Clinton, have nonetheless set out substantive – and quite similar – policy packages on energy and global warming, and health care. In terms of the latter, Hillary Clinton, Obama and Edwards all promise to take up the project that failed so spectacularly in the Bill Clinton administration with the involvement of Hillary: a programme to bring health insurance to all, or nearly all, Americans. The Republicans deride this as European-style ‘socialised medicine’, but the Democrats seem convinced that anxiety about the haphazard and capricious insurance system is again broad enough to make reform a politically viable project. On this and other matters, the combatively populist approach of Edwards has set the tone, pushing the Democratic candidates’ debate slightly to the left.

 

On foreign policy, the choice could be even starker. All the leading Democratic candidates have tried to temper the expectations of their anti-war base about a quick withdrawal from Iraq. On policy towards Iran, they are ostentatiously keeping ‘all options on the table’ (with Obama and Edwards arguably less likely than Clinton to employ military force), but all have promised that they would engage with Iran unconditionally to try to resolve the dispute over its nuclear ambitions. And the Democrats take as a starting point the view that something has gone terribly awry in the face and the posture that America has presented to the world in the last seven years. The most important conclusion that they draw is seen in their promises to reinstate unequivocally America’s traditional prohibition of torture and other forms of mistreatment of enemy combatants.

 

On the Republican side, by contrast, and with the notable exception of McCain, there is instead a tendency to parse the definition of ‘torture’, and to argue that these exceptional times of terrorist danger require a willingness to engage in forms of ‘enhanced interrogation’. Giuliani in particular is running as the candidate of 11 September to replace the president of 11 September. The unpopular incumbent president is not one with whom Giuliani, or any other Republican nominee, is likely to associate themselves too vigorously in the election campaign next autumn. But, in the important respect of focusing American foreign policy, without apologies, on the ‘war on terror’, they share Bush’s world view.